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You probably won't be satisfied if we say "They're magic," so here's what we found on the Web: We searched Yahoo! using the keyword phrase "how things work," since we suspected that a specific search just using "pagers" would lead us to business listings rather than informational resources. Our general search provided us with two promising sites. The first, How Things Work, run by a physics professor from the University of Virginia, offers detailed answers to user-submitted science questions. Unfortunately, we couldn't find any mention of pagers or paging technology, and after several minutes of fascinated browsing, we moved on. The second site, How Stuff Works, really looked
like a winner. Not only had it won a Cool Site of the Year award in 1998, but there were dozens and dozens of illustrated articles explaining the inner workings of everything from car engines to cruise missiles. We did find a great piece on cell phones, which we figure are pretty similar to pagers, but in the end, even the amazing Stuff site didn't have what we wanted. Back to the search box, we entered "how pagers work" and hoped for the best. Yahoo!'s search results were less than useful, so we clicked on Alta Vista to get a second opinion. Lo and behold, we hit paging pay dirt. Several of the sites listed, including ProBeep's "How Pagers Work" page and Radio
Design Group's similar resource, give detailed descriptions and illustrations of the technology involved in beeping your buddies.
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